Portside

Billions knows how to have fun with its depraved, cartoon-y universe of scheming hedge-fund managers and corrupt federal attorneys; it also knows how to dial it back just enough to feel like an authentic parallel to these depraved, cartoon-y times in America.

Teachers in Oklahoma, Arizona, and Kentucky are now striking, sicking out, rallying, and Facebooking to push officials to raise their salaries and defend their benefits.

According to the study the black-white gap in upward mobility is driven entirely by differences in men’s, not women’s, outcomes.

The myth is that pharmaceutical industry profits come from producing and selling the many therapeutic advances that industry research has generated, but the reality is far different.

It is difficult to say how much López Obrador could, or would, do if elected, given the forces arrayed against him, both at home and from the north. But if there is a reform candidate and party in the race, it is López Obrador and his Morena party.

Jacobin’s Loren Balhorn sat down with German labor sociologist Klaus Dörre to find out more about the strike, what the workers really gained, and what it might say about the German labor movement’s future.

If you conceive of the Universe as the full suite of matter and energy we know, and the early stages had it all compressed into a tiny region of space, then why didn't it collapse into a black hole?

The latest Facebook personal data revelations provide a window into the future we have sleepwalked into, the era of Surveillance Capitalism. The sins of Facebook and Cambridge Analytica must spark demands for a much wider debate about the role of surveillance in our increasingly digital society.

Two new books about making change in smaller cities are worthy of close study by anyone hoping to push their own city hall in a similar left-wing direction.

What about in Somerville? According to a recent email I got from the City’s Assessing Department, “if the University was a taxable entity it would generate residential tax at $596,700 and commercial tax at $6,103,800.”